2020 Hindsight

Meme that’s making the rounds right now: 2021 will be the first year we’ve ever really had 2020 hindsight.

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The holiday wasn’t too awful.

I zoomed with RTT and Ben’s brothers. Lew is a genuinely sweet human being, and I love Ed, Lew’s Significant Other. TSWSOINC remains an absolute cipher, his true motivations and reactions lockboxed in a chest 20,000 leagues under the sea. He zoomed from his home in Georgia—the former USSR republic, not the Last Train To. His wife, Keti, has hair the same color as mine, so naturally I thought she was terrific, and their daughter, Miriam, attends the Largest Hotel Management School in the World, which turns out to be in Amsterdam. Who knew?

It dawns on me that in the space of less than a week, I have hung out virtually with the families of both my X-husbands. I suppose that means that Rik was right: The marriage goes away but not the family relationships.

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Ichabod texted photos of the pastries he’d spent the morning baking:



He is quite the chef! I remembered how for his 16th birthday, he asked for cooking lessons at the Monterey Culinary Academy.

We went vox, too, and I got to talk to Mia. Mia and I fell all over ourselves blithering, “This has been such a hard year! I love you!”

When I got off the phone, I thought, Huh! I guess this must mean I love Mia.

Who knew?

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Dinner was fine. I felt kinda bad because L really threw herself into preparing—coconut shrimp, Oysters Rockefeller, goose—and I thought the food was meh. But ever the dissembler in service to etiquette, I praised her lavishly, and everyone else praised her lavishly, and she does love to cook.

I can’t recommend goose. It tastes like turkey dark meat—come to think of it, I’m not a big fan of turkey either—and it’s an awful bother to cook.

I masked at the dinner table.

It wasn’t a large table, but there were people seated from outside the Bubble.

Eating while masked is something of a challenge.

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. It was warm but pouring rain and blustering. Half a million people up and down the Hudson Valley lost electricity. But not us.

Definitely not tromping weather, so I spent the day watching various versions of A Christmas Carol, brought to me by the miracle of subscribing to Every Streaming Service Known to Man.

Dickens’ novella contains one of my favorite snippets of dialogue of all time.

“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato,” Scrooge tells Jacob Marley’s ghost when it first comes to call. “There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

My basis for evaluating all Christmas Carols is how the film handles the subsequent pivot that Scrooge performs from sensible skeptic to terrified sniveler.

Alistair Sim, in the 1951 version of the movie, does it convincingly in under 10 seconds, which is why this version in all its black-and-white and lame-special-effects cludginess remains the best.

It’s very clear that George C. Scott’s Scrooge in the 1984 Christmas Carol version is merely placating Jacob Marley’s ghost. George C. Scott was an excellent actor, which actually works against him here; throughout the film, he makes several arguments in favor of capitalism—a word I don’t believe had yet been invented in Dickens’ time—that I bought into completely. I mean, the real problem in Victorian England was that workhouses sucked, right? Not that they existed. Let’s hear it for the safety net!

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Under the influence of A Christmas Carol, I made various end-of-the-year donations. There were considerably more of them and they were considerably larger this year than last—in part because of the promise I made to You Know Who You Are and in part because though this past month has been hard, and the next three months likely to be even harder, 2020 in general has been nowhere near as tough for me as it seems to have been for the majority of humans. My income wasn’t affected plus I’m old, and it’s likely I wouldn’t be out crowd-mongering even if crowd-mongering were an option.

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In the evening, my beloved Nafisa texted me. She’s currently in Virginia with her husband.

I never wrote about what happened when Nafisa took the USMLE.

There were horrible technical problems on the test provider’s end, too numerous and harrowing to describe here, which ended up making the test virtually untakeable, and Nafisa called me in hysterics the moment it was over.

“Take a bath,” I advised her. “A long bath. Do you have bath salts? Use them.”

My teaching had been based on the notion that something would go wrong while she was taking the exam though not that it would go wrong to the degree it did. But I’d been striving to make the reading and writing strategies automatic with the thought that if these things became second nature, she could take the exam in a foxhole with bombs exploding all around her, and she’d still pass.

Of course, 12 days is not the optimal length of time to embed new thought processes that deeply.

And unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing I could do with her about the listening part of the test, which involves transcribing text from the spoken words of various English speakers with various English-speaking accents. That’s something you only learn how to do with practice.

I sent her the telephone number for the USMLE complaints department the morning after the exam.

I called the educational commission for foreign medical graduates, she texted last night. i told them about the OET technical issues that I faced during my exam and they said still they are not responsible and they can’t do anything about it.

They asked me to write an email about my complain and they will not going to work with them next year, but now they aren’t able to do anything.

Ouch.

She hasn’t gotten the exam results back yet, though.

I remain optimistic. She is so very, very smart.

When she gets back from Virginia, I’m going to suggest that we collaborate on a Medium piece about her ordeal, and then send out press releases touting the piece to every medical facility, healthcare agency, and media outlet bemoaning the lack of qualified physicians in the wake of the Covid crisis.

Hey! It’s worth a shot, right?

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My kids wrote Christmas cards for you and the cat, she texted.

Her kids like me.

At the beginning of each of my lessons with Nafisa, Sybyl the cat conducted a brief English lesson with her kids so that they would not feel left out since Nafisa was alone in the house with the kids while her husband worked in Virginia, and the kids had begun acting out.

Sybyl's English lessons charmed them into some semblence of good behavior.

Then when I checked my email before bed, I discovered that Nafisa had given me a ginormous Amazon gift card.

It made me feel quite strange because (a) my ancient Wacom digital drawing tablet has given up the ghost earlier that day and Nafisa’s gift would pay for a new one but (b) working with Nafisa has never been about wanting something back.

Of course, Nafisa and her family are well off. Her husband is a civil engineer, making the Big Buck$. So, it’s not like snatching bread from the mouths of the hungry. Though, of course, everything involving Amazon is about snatching bread from the mouths of the hungry on some level.